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Sago Pudding, Boiled (superior)
Soak an ounce and a half of sago for an hour. Strain it, and boil it in a pint of milk till it is clear, and to flavour it add an ounce of blanched and pounded almonds, the thin rind of a lemon, or an inch of stick cinnamon. Pour the sago out, remove the flavouring ingredients, and stir it till cool. Beat it up with two sponge biscuits crushed to powder, the well-whisked yolks of five eggs and the whites of two, a little sugar, and a glassful of sherry or Madeira. Boil the pudding as in the last recipe. Let it stand three or four minutes, turn it out carefully, and serve with wine sauce or with half a pint of any fresh fruit boiled with sugar and water to a rich syrup, and strained over the pudding. Time to boil, one hour. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the wine and sauce. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian boiled pudding: sago thickened in milk, enriched with egg and sherry, cooked in a covered mould set in simmering water. The instructions assume you have read the preceding recipe in the book, so the actual cooking method needs spelling out.
- The hinge: cool the sago firstThe sago must be stirred until genuinely cool before the yolks go in, or they will set into threads and the pudding will be grainy rather than smooth. Lukewarm is not cool enough; take it to room temperature.
- "Boil the pudding as in the last recipe"The cross-reference points to instructions we do not have here, but the standard method for a boiled pudding of this kind is a well-buttered mould or basin, covered with buttered paper and a floured cloth tied down, lowered into a pan of boiling water coming most of the way up the side. Keep it at a steady simmer rather than a hard boil, and top up with boiling water as the level drops over the hour.
- SagoPearl sago is palm starch, sold in Asian and Caribbean groceries alongside tapioca pearls. Small tapioca pearls behave almost identically here. An ounce and a half is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons; a pint of milk is 20 fl oz British measure, or about 2 1/2 US cups.
- Sponge biscuitsThese are the dry, crisp sponge fingers sold as savoiardi or ladyfingers rather than the soft kind. Two of them crushed give a few tablespoons of crumbs; the size was never standardised, so judge by eye -- enough to bind without weighing the pudding down.
- AlmondsAn ounce of blanched, pounded almonds is about 1/4 cup whole nuts. Ground almonds or almond flour work, though pounding your own gives a coarser texture and more perfume. The almonds stay in the pudding; only the lemon rind or cinnamon is fished out.
- "A glassful" of wineGenuinely ambiguous in a book of this date, but a wine glass in Victorian recipe writing usually meant about 2 fl oz. Err low: too much liquid and the pudding will not hold its shape when turned out.
- Standing before turning outThe three or four minutes off the heat let the pudding contract slightly from the mould. Loosen the edge, invert onto a warmed dish, and lift the mould straight up rather than shaking it.
- YieldFour or five modest servings, as stated. The fruit-syrup option is the better of the two sauces if you have already used sherry in the pudding itself.
Sago reached British kitchens as a colonial import, the starch washed from the pith of the sago palm in island Southeast Asia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it sat in the store cupboard next to arrowroot and tapioca as one of the standard invalid and nursery thickeners. That reputation is exactly what the parenthetical "(superior)" is arguing against: this is sago lifted out of the sickroom with almonds, egg yolks, sponge biscuit and a glass of sherry into something fit for a dinner table. The boiled pudding in a cloth-tied mould was the default British sweet before domestic ovens became reliable and cheap, and the "probable cost, 1s." line is a reminder of what these dictionaries were for \, with the costing noted as excluding the wine and sauce.